Peter Feaver: Different Medicines for Different Maladies

President Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech was roundly criticized as signifying an intent to treat very different problems, Iraq and North Korea, with a mindless one-size-fits-all foreign policy.

Now the critics are lambasting the president precisely because he is taking differentiated steps in response to Iraq and North Korea. In other words, because he is not mindlessly using a one-size-fits-all foreign policy. Yet even opportunistic critics can raise serious questions. Why propose war in response to Iraq's ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction while proposing containment in response to North Korea's? Does good foreign policy require the Bush administration to treat both nations the same?

The answer is no. A good foreign policy should recognize linkages across issue areas because, in the real world, one cannot deal with issues in total isolation. But a rigid doctrine that prescribes the same medicine in the same dosages to every global malady is hardly good foreign policy.

Consider how the seemingly analogous cases of Iraq and North Korea involve very different calculations once one gets to the nitty-gritty of costs and benefits.

Iraq harbors revisionist geopolitical goals; it has gone to war several times in the past 25 years to redraw local boundaries. It is seeking weapons of mass destruction as a shield behind which to reach regional supremacy.

The United States has inhibited Iraq from reaching the first goal through a vigorous policy of containment, but that policy would be undermined if Iraq succeeds in its second goal. Iraqi nuclear weapons would pose a considerable deterrent threat, perhaps enough to neutralize the deterrent the United States was trying to mount against Iraq. Even our current conventional war plans would be undermined, for it is doubtful the United States could move the necessary forces into the theater if Iraq could threaten the ports and bases with nuclear weapons.

Faced with Iraqi nuclear weapons, the United States would have to deploy a permanent in-theater conventional deterrent, as we did against the Warsaw Pact in Europe for 50 years (and still do in Korea). Can fragile societies such as Saudi Arabia tolerate a large permanent presence of U.S. troops on their soil or would that produce the very catastrophic upheaval some assert even a brief and successful war would generate? Recall that al-Qaeda was formed in response to the semi-permanent presence of much smaller U.S. forces deployed to Saudi Arabia to carry out the no-fly zone.

Moreover, if critics are right and Iraq is such an ethnic tinderbox that toppling Saddam Hussein by force would leave a Yugoslavia-style mess, then that mess would arise if he is toppled by natural causes. Does anyone really think that the United States could stay out of a bloody ethnic civil war in Iraq? Leave aside the morality of it -- the pacifists and isolationists seem not to be bothered by our sins of omission in Rwanda, Sudan or now in Congo. It is simply not strategically plausible that the United States could ignore such upheaval so close to the crucial global oil lifeline.

Weighing costs

In other words, not going to war in Iraq produces most of the same costs as going to war and few of the benefits. And, the costs of war mount exponentially once Iraq has crossed the nuclear threshold, so war is a plausible option only in advance.

North Korea proves this latter point rather dramatically.

North Korea harbors revisionist goals -- it claims to want a unified Korea under Northern dominance -- and it has a robust weapons of mass destruction program. It probably developed nuclear weapons early in President Clinton's first term and has recently admitted that it never abandoned its nuclear program -- despite promising the Clinton administration that it would in exchange for substantial financial incentives. Unlike Iraq, which is desperately hiding its WMD ambitions, North Korea is flaunting its desire to expand its arsenal and going to extraordinary lengths to stick its thumb in the United Nations' eye.

If costs and benefits did not matter, if foreign policy were nothing more than the mindless application of legalistic standards, then North Korea would deserve a more solid thumping than Iraq. But costs and benefits do matter, and they cut the other way.

North Korea's revisionist goals are effectively deterred by the permanent presence of several divisions worth of U.S. troops. South Korea (unlike Saudi Arabia or Kuwait) can mount a more effective deterrent itself-- after all, it is larger and many times richer than North Korea.

Containment has worked for more than 50 years on the Korean peninsula, and this would not change even if North Korea's nuclear arsenal expanded. But containment is also working on the other side. North Korea can credibly threaten unacceptable damage to South Korea -- perhaps hundreds of thousands of casualties in Seoul alone within the first few hours of a war -- making pre-emptive war prohibitively expensive.

Differences make sense

The real threat is that North Korea sells everything it builds, and it might do that with nuclear weapons. This is grounds enough to be worried, but is it grounds for risking hundreds of thousands of allied deaths? Maybe, just maybe, if North Korea is stupid enough to sell nuclear weapons to a terrorist organization such as al-Qaeda. Otherwise, the costs of war far exceed the plausible benefits. And, at least for the foreseeable future, the costs of war far exceed the costs of not going to war.

It makes sense, then, to treat North Korea and Iraq differently, even if it opens the United States up to opportunistic criticism.

Of course, the hawks in the Bush administration engaged in their own opportunistic punditry on these issues, back in the 1990s when their only outlet was the op-ed pages. Then, they railed against the Clinton administration's appeasement of North Korea, predicting it would only encourage the North Korean regime to pursue WMD. The Bush hawks were correct, but they did not concede -- not until recently, anyway -- that once Clinton allowed the North Koreans to cross the nuclear threshold, there were no viable alternatives to seeking some sort of accommodation.

In that sense, the glee with which Democrats hoist the Bush team on its own petard is understandable. Clinton-Gore officials had to take their lumps, and we should not begrudge them an opportunity to dish some out now. But neither should we let them mislead us as to the desirability of faux consistency in the face of very different challenges.

This article originally appeared in the Jan. 12 (Raleigh) News and Observer.